Frankfurt am Main (Germany), March 11, 2014 – Independent videogame developer and publisher Crytek has outlined details of what it will be showing attendees when this year’s GDC conference gets underway in San Francisco. During the expo, which takes from March 19-21, Crytek will give visitors a look at the evolution of its game-changing CRYENGINE software, as well as inviting them to go hands-on with free-to-play shooter Warface and brand new mobile title, The Collectables.

During presentations and hands-on demos at Crytek’s GDC booth, attendees can see for the first time ever full native Linux support in the new CRYENGINE. The CRYENGINE all-in-one game engine is also updated with the innovative features used to recreate the stunning Roman Empire seen in Ryse – including the brand new Physically Based Shading render pipeline, which uses real-world physics simulation to create amazingly realistic lighting and materials in CRYENGINE games.

There will also be games on offer, with the latest version of free online FPS Warface available to play. With intense new Tower Raid and Capture modes just launched, players can see how far Crytek’s self-published shooter has come in the last year as they team up with fellow GDC visitors to take out the enemy. Also playable will be The Collectables, an upcoming military strategy game for iOS and Android that transports Crytek’s trademark action onto the small screen.

Crytek staff will also be sharing their expertise in a series of talks during GDC. From discussing narrative driven games to the rendering technology in Ryse, a total of five presentations from Crytek employees will be taking place as part of GDC’s session series. All the talks will be held in the Center’s West Hall. Read more details at the official Crytek Blog.

To see the latest iteration of CRYENGINE in full flow and try your hand at Warface and The Collectables, visit booth #802 in the Moscone Center’s South Hall when GDC kicks off next week.

All customers of Deadfall Adventures should now have access to the Linux depot. This is not a beta version since we need especially feedback on a wide variety of hardware configurations.
We are actively monitoring feedback and will provide if possible regular updates.

The announcement also delineates current known issues; be sure to send in reports so that the build can be iterated on!

BERLIN. The Flux-State: a stable anarchy enforced by an ever-shifting coalition of megacorps, political factions, and savvy power players. A place where almost anything goes and the right connections can be the difference between success and starvation. Dangerous jobs abound and there’s no better place to earn a quick payday – provided you live long enough to spend it. For you and your team of battle-scarred runners, it’s just another day in the Free City of Berlin.

But a new threat is rising, one that could mean untold chaos and devastation. The only clue: whispers of the DRAGONFALL, a long-forgotten event from the earliest days of the Awakened world. As you find yourself drawn into a maze of veiled dangers and strange machinations, you will come face-to-face with a grim spectre of the past… and alter the course of Berlin’s future.

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Shadowrun: Dragonfall will be released January 2014 for Windows, OSX, and Linux and will be free to Backers who will get the same number of Steam keys received for the original game via our Backer website. (Details about getting the DRM-free version will come in a future update.)

Dragonfall will launch at $14.99 and we’ll also release the Shadowrun Campaign Pack on the same day. The campaign pack contains the original game and the Dragonfall expansion in one package for only $24.99. We think it’s a great way to get new players into Shadowrun.

A typical game of King Arthur’s Gold for you may go like this: Wake up. Chop down a tree. Mine some rocks. Build a tower. Swap class to archer. Fire some arrows. Launch a fire arrow. Burn down a parapet. Smile. Jump off the tower. Grappling hook! Fire a volley of three arrows in quick Legolas-like succession, while still hanging from the walls. Swap class to knight. Get into catapult. Launch yourself from catapult. Weeeee! Hover to the map’s central lake using your shield as a glider. Meet a shark. Ride the shark across the lake. The enemy lines! Slice up an archer. Slice up a knight. Plant a mine outside the enemy’s front door. Escape! Don’t escape. You have been killed by a falling longboat.

Crusader Kings II: Sons of Abraham is the fifth expansion for the critically praised strategy/RPG , focusing on the Abrahamic religions; Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

Get your bishops appointed cardinals and tap the might of the Papacy, borrow money from the Knights Templar and send troublesome relatives off to live out their days in a monastery. Sons of Abraham also introduces the Jewish religion and allows you to recreate the Kingdom of Israel and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.

The expansion for Crusader Kings II explores one of the defining periods in world history in an experience crafted by Paradox Development Studio, the masters of Grand Strategy. Medieval Europe is brought to life in this epic game of knights, schemes, and thrones.

Roguelike-like Bionic Dues has been released from Arcen Games. It’s their first Linux release and it has customizable bots called Exos that you take into turn-based battle against a robot rebellion. This post is up so late because I was busy causing robots pain in a roguelike fashion. If you’d like robots to eat your homework, too, then I mechanically recommend Bionic Dues.

Strategy First and developer Four Flash have released their latest RTS Timelines: Assault on America. A Red Dawn scenario where the United States of America has assassinated Adolf Hitler and Germany and Japan have turned to attack the US. The game also features 4-player co-op in addition to your other cross-platform multiplayer game types.

Surprisingly, the developers website only lists two names as having worked on the game.

This week Valve is making three announcements regarding their plans for expanding their plans for the living room. The first of which is SteamOS. A freely available Linux-based Operating System that Valve are advertising as having improved graphics and audio performance, as well as decreased input latency.

Valve specifically mentions that more AAA games are being ported natively to SteamOS and presumably will be available for any Linux install of Steam. For games that aren’t available natively on Linux, Steam will soon be able to stream them from Windows and Mac personal computers.

The new OS will also bring three other new features in addition to game streaming: Music, movie and TV services; Family sharing for sharing your library of games; and Family Options to hide games from your kids.

SteamOS will be released “soon” with the intent that we can put it on our own computers and businesses will be able to release their own SteamOS gaming PCs.

Valve still has two more announcements to make, the countdown site currently has two more days to go so we’ll know more on Wednesday.

Like sand through the hourglass, for two weeks we’ve got another Humble Indie Bundle. It’s the pay-what-you-want, but more than $1 to get Steam keys, with some percentage or all of it going to charity for a bundle of:

Trine 2: Complete Story

Mark of the Ninja

Eets Munchies Beta

Brutal Legend

If you pay more than the average price you’ll also get:

FTL: Faster Than Light

Fez

This time the Humble Bundle folks are already advertising that more games will be added to the bundle, because they always do that one week into it. You’ll have to pay more than the average price to get access to those as well.

Fez, FTL, and Mark of the Ninja are great games. Don’t look up any hints if play Fez. That game is too awesome to spoil.

Mysterious adventure and mystery game, MirrorMoon EP has just been released on Steam. Here’s what the developer has to say about it:

These space travels begin on a red planet and its unique moon and extend across galaxies.
The single player part of MirrorMoon EP blends adventure and exploration with navigation-based puzzle solving. The multiplayer of MirrorMoon EP lets players share Galaxy Maps with other players: the first explorers to land on a planet will be able to name its Star System and that name will be forever bound to the star for any other fellow traveler who encounters it.

Each Galaxy consists of a thousand Systems: it will be possible to fully discover the mysteries of MirrorMoon EP only while collaborating with other players.
Through the apparently indecipherable cockpit of an unknown spacecraft, players will be able to locate and travel to mysterious planets. Each planet has artifacts, buildings, and puzzles on its surface, hidden in astonishing low-poly sceneries.

id software lost company president Todd Hollenshead earlier this year, and just after the most recent QuakeCon legendary developer John Carmack has announced his departure. The blog for Oculus, the company behind the popular Oculus Rift VR headset, has this quote from Carmack:

I have fond memories of the development work that led to a lot of great things in modern gaming – the intensity of the first person experience, LAN and internet play, game mods, and so on. Duct taping a strap and hot gluing sensors onto Palmer’s early prototype Rift and writing the code to drive it ranks right up there. Now is a special time. I believe that VR will have a huge impact in the coming years, but everyone working today is a pioneer. The paradigms that everyone will take for granted in the future are being figured out today; probably by people reading this message. It’s certainly not there yet. There is a lot more work to do, and there are problems we don’t even know about that will need to be solved, but I am eager to work on them. It’s going to be awesome!

id’s twitter says that Carmack isn’t leaving, but it seems unlikely that a full-time job as Oculus’ CTO will provide Carmack with much time to work on id games.

Happy to say @id_aa_carmack is not leaving id & will continue to provide leadership for our games in development.

Carmack is largely responsible for the free software releases of id software’s source code and their push for Linux support. Though the latter has been waning since Linux code slave Timothée Besset’s departure from the company in 2012.

After a seemingly infinite beta test, Valve’s MOBA, DOTA 2 was released for Windows recently and now we’ve got our Linux version. DOTA 2, and MOBAs in general, are a spin-off of the real time strategy genre, in which two teams of five heroes compete to destroy the opposing team’s base.

DOTA 2 is actually super competitive and I’ve found it to be hugely unfriendly to new players so you might want to play some bot matches before going online. There are some really good guides out there as well, one which was recommended to me after getting my ass kicked recently was Purge Gamers’ “Welcome to Dota, you Suck.“

Indie game download store, Desura, just got taken off the circuit by Linden Lab. They’re the developer behind fursona simulator Second Life. Linden’s press release makes it clear that they’ve acquired the team behind Desura, but what isn’t clear yet is what this means for the future of the digital distribution platform. Thanks to GoL for the heads-up.

Here’s the details:

SAN FRANCISCO – July 10, 2013 – Linden Lab, the makers of shared creative spaces including Second Life, Patterns, Creatorverse, Versu, and dio, today announced that it has acquired Desura, a digital distribution service for PC gamers. The service will continue uninterrupted for current customers and the team and technology become a part of Linden Lab.

Desura puts the best games, mods, and downloadable content from developers at gamers’ fingertips, ready to buy and play. The free Desura application can serve and patch games, mods, and add-ons directly for customers around the world. Developers and publishers can share news, images, videos, and other content through their profiles, while every member of the Desura community can post comments, submit reviews, and upload screenshots from their own playing experiences. Desura also demystifies user-made mods and add-ons for games by making them as easy to find and install or update as professional titles.

“Desura’s talented team, thriving business, and impressive technology are a great fit for Linden Lab,” said Rod Humble, CEO of Linden Lab. “This acquisition gives us a global platform for serving creative developers of all kinds, and we’re looking forward to growing both Desura’s global community of gamers and its fantastic portfolio of thousands of games, mods, and other content. Our aim is to invest and support the Desura team in making it the most open and developer-friendly platform in the world.”

Our long national nightmare has ended as Valve updated their Left 4 Dead blog with news of co-op Zombie shooter Left 4 Dead 2’s general availability for Linux:

The Extended Mutation System, Linux support, and other features and fixes are moving to Left 4 Dead 2 proper. Thanks to everyone who helped test all the changes in the Beta Build. You can find a complete list of the change notes here.

LinuxThe Linux conversion is ready for primetime so we are opening it up to more people and releasing it officially on Steam. This will let us get feedback on more builds and distros.

The game itself is available at 75% off this weekend ($4.99 ‘merican) , and you can play it for free until Sunday at 1PM Pacific time.

Source, the game engine developed by Valve, just got an update to its software development kit to support Linux:

We have released an update to the Source SDK, bringing support for Mac OS X and Linux to mod developers and exposing the ability for virtual reality support in your mod. The biggest change with this update is that we are using github to host the source code. You will find the code here. This Source SDK 2013 release also includes a new license that can be found here. This new license allows mod authors to share their changes to the SDK more easily.

The other change with the Source SDK is that now Hammer and the other mod tools ship with their respective games instead of as part of the SDK Launcher. The launcher itself is being phased out, so it will disappear from your Tools list. You can find information about how to run the tools from the games here.

The source for this new SDK release includes the latest code for all the included games, and has many new features:• The games now build and run clients on Windows, OSX, and Linux. Dedicated servers are supported on Windows and Linux.• Steam Pipe (the new Steam content delivery system) is supported by the sample mods. Existing mods can change their gameinfo.txt to match the new format and gain Steam Pipe support.• Support for Virtual Reality via the Oculus Rift has been added to the SDK. Running a compatible mod with -vr on the command line will run the mod in stereo and enable head tracking on the Rift.

As one of the first games being developed with Linux support in mind, utilizing Unreal Engine 4, we plan to back port our work back to Epic for future Linux support. Our team plans to provide recent versions of our source code updates to Epic so the Linux Gaming community can benefit through our efforts. This way our revisions can be used by future developers of UE4 to also support Linux. We hope our Linux backers on Kickstarter will appreciate all the consideration we’ve put into our Linux build.

The post also mentions that they’re looking for Linux testers (resume required), so shoot them a note if you have the background and interest!

Yes, Big Robot is going to make a game featuring robots. It’s called Sir, You Are Being Hunted, and it taps into a rich seam of tweed-loving British science fiction to conjure a sinister reality where artificial gentlemen hunt humans for sport.
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Hunted is set in a recognisably British landscape. Its inhabitants are a mockery of the aristocratic country gent and his ecosystem. Robots that ape tea-drinking, poachers that lurk in reed-beds, and red-eyed hounds that patrol the moor: these are the things you will be dealing with as you fight for survival. The game gathers up elements of my favourite things: exploration, AI interaction, survival, robots, hot drinks, and blends them into a rich pixelly pulp. (A “British indie S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” might have been something we said in the design meetings…)

The developers recently posted a gameplay preview set in a mountain biome: